There are wings out there that do require you to at least sit and learn the topic (no exam, in fairness) before teaching it.
And anybody who’s even a little bit serious about delivering lessons half decently should take a bit of time to get acquainted with the subject.
Unless a squadron has the old books somewhere. what’s on ultilearn is insufficient to get acquainted with the subject, apart from maybe the propulsion topics, which IMO are too the other extreme.
…Or you just access a pdf version online. You don’t need paper copies, but if you’re really old fashioned you can print them off.
I came back into the organisation last year and was able to find the most up to date version of each topic without any hard work.
According to what we were told when we went over to the online training, was that the books were defunct, but looking at the questions for all but AK and a couple of fiddles with Basic and Leading Airmanship (which make no sense to me) that was a bare faced lie.
Personally HQAC should be providing the books like they did before.
Essentially, yes although I think that there’s plenty of scope for streamlining.
I personally think that a facility to print exams on-unit from an online database of questions, have the cadets take the exams under exam conditions (no notes), squadron staff mark the papers and then upload the result to SMS.
I do like the idea of a pass percentage on each section of the exam, although I think it should be done by LO (so 6-8 questions) rather than on each pass criterion (2 questions).
I’d have the exams printed at Wing on demand and I think there needs to be some level of independent scrutiny, otherwise it would be little better than what we have now, a marking grid could be supplied and marked on the day and passes entered.
If the cadets fail then you would immediately be able to see where the weaknesses are and address them for a resit.
I’ve thought for long while we should have something better than the 1 from 2 securing a pass for each LO and go back to the old 25 questions per subject and reintroduce the 3 tier pass. I was quite pleased to get a distinction for Ldg and Staff 1 and credit for Senior, although only I knew it and I think having pass levels made you work harder if you wanted to.
The issue there is a vastly increased cost and complexity - and it would be at least as secure against cheating as we have now.
Ultimately, you either need to (a) just trust the unit staff to do things honestly or (b) have an external member of staff come across to invigilate, which as we know was a massive PITA.
it’s not really that complex or costly and gives security against cheating.
What we have is the result of doing it on the cheap in nasty way. Pay peanuts get monkeys, as they say. Although we pay macadamia and still only get monkeys.
When ultifail would only let 3 people log on at anyone time in the evening, we started doing exams on a Saturday morning, when, oddly, logging on wasn’t such a problem. We opened at 0900 and done by 1030 at the latest. Therefore if you applied the same model, paper exams could be done over a weekend at time of personal choosing convenient to staff. Cadets turn up do them and go. The only bugbear was I as OC had to be there, in case the cadets stuffed up logging in, which wasn’t difficult given the nonsense username and the short life of the passwords at the time.
It won’t give any security against cheating, unless you have an external invigilator.
Doing it on a weekend can get around that.
If we travelled to another sqn as invigilator we got mileage, not much but the thought was there.
I’ve got an ACP 31 somewhere. That was rather good.
What? One of the old all in one types; loose leaf with hard covers?
I have one, they are great.
Lucky sod. Send it to HQAC so they can see what it was like when we did things properly.
Theyd just be confused by such an item. An item that has proper well laid out instructions.Boy that will really send them in ever decreasing circles
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